The Transformative Power of Tragedy
What does it mean to be high-agency?
In 2006 Rudolf Vrba died in a Vancouver hospital at the age of 81. He was survived by his wife, his daughter, and two grandchildren. Over the course of his life Vrba had been a Slovakian, Israeli, British, and Canadian citizen. He had found success as a research fellow at Harvard Medical school and published over 50 papers while working as a professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia.
He had also escaped from Auschwitz. Following the escape he informed the Allied forces of what was happening in the concentration camps. That report led to the Vatican pressuring Hungary - a Nazi aligned but not controlled state - to stop the trains that were sending Jews to their death. They did. It is estimated that in this way Vrba saved up to 200,000 lives1.
People talk a lot about lives like Vrba's being the result of a strong will. They might say that he was a high “agency” person. But what does this word agency really mean, and how do we become this kind of person?
Agency is associated with the ability to direct power - to act in the world to achieve a particular outcome. For example, we might say a person has agency if they walk up to a stranger on the street and start a conversation with them.
This is different from that person having skill, the ability to achieve an outcome. You may be a charismatic communicator or an awkward stutterer. Yet, whether you have the ability for smooth talking and whether you choose to direct that skill towards a particular end are two very different things.
This makes it difficult to collate a collection of examples of high-agency from which to derive a standard profile or a set of distinctive characteristics. You can't rely on referring to people that have achieved something great. If someone is born into an artistic family and was trained how to paint from a young age they may be a recognised master of the craft by the time they’re a teenager. It takes a person with a special kind of determination though to take that training and break free from their artistic heritage.
Differentiating skill and agency is tough but it is doable. There is one heuristic in particular that seems to work when looking around to identify the lives of high-agency people. If they experienced tragedy did afterwards did they continue along the well-trod paths of their social setting or was their life transformed in new and bold ways2?
To illustrate, you can imagine reading the resume that someone you are interviewing sent you. The story this document presents of work, education, and ‘extra-curricular' activities is flattening. It smooths out a person’s trials and tribulations, the spikes and swerves of daily decision making. But, it is also revealing.
For the most part, depending on the job, there are a few standard stories that people tell. In my world that means: The mechanical engineer turned consultant via an MBA when they realised there was a limit to how fun maths was, the doctor who became a software engineer when they realised they could make as much money without 14 hour days and constant trauma, and the finance pursuer who went from business school to a bank and back again.
Once in a while though you come across a resume you can't follow. There are big gaps in the timeline or multiple dramatic career swings. Perhaps the wording for one of the job experiences is ‘off’ compared to what you expect. You can't quite track how the trajectory could come from someone with a defined type, the heart of an artist, an activist or a capitalist.
This is the investment banker who spends evenings and weekends as a ghost hunter giving tours of abandoned water plants, the software engineer who petitions to save local churches by designating them as heritage sites, and the theatre director who wrote the definitive account of the creation of the FDA.
Often, though not universally, these meandering paths are like the diversity of unhappy families3. At some point there was a sharp bend in the road: a serious illness, a failed venture, or a dissolved romance. Following this event was the wilderness, a time of introspection and change4 and then a profoundly new way forward.
Such bends do not by default create these kinds of resumes. The norm is for tragedy to be subsumed behind the onslaught of the standard, “positive” narrative for their social setting or in the worst cases the tragedy may simply end the possibility of any narrative. Yet for a few it is the catalyst for a truly unique story.
This is the kind of resume that Rudolf Vrba had. One where there were catastrophes, glories and through the whole thread the expression of a person’s unique character. It's inspiring, but it’s also rare which is surprising. Everyone has particular characteristic interests and no-one is able to go through life completely unscathed by a significant upset of one kind or another. Yet, for the vast majority of people their life stories revert to a path that can be glossed with relative ease by the average resume reader. Why is this?
The reason is that there are those for whom tragedy is first and foremost a loss and then there are those for whom it breaks them free from their past mould and in the process transforms their life. This difference is the key to understanding agency.
When we are trying to figure out where we want to go in our career, or even oour life in general, out first instinct is to look at the people around us. They all have wants and desires that seem to arrive naturally and can become models for our own. Looking around like this isn't wise, though. The crowd has a tendency to get swept up in a particular self-reinforcing way of seeing the world. The conversation narrows to a very tight set of parameters. As everyone mimics each other they all end up in the same barren landscape of a few, well explored, potential paths.
Worse, what the crowd seeks has a tendency to resolve to a kind of lowest common denominator: wealth, status, fame… power. In its own way these desires can do well enough but ultimately they are shallow and undistinguished, the opposite of high-agency. If you want to do something more valuable you need to be able to look somewhere else.
The across the board advice I have is not to be overly competitive, the tracks force you to compete. You compete, you win, you cycle, you compete. You need to find something where you're not just looking at the people around you and you have some other reference point.
This is more of a religious cut on this but I'm always struck by how in the ten commandments… the first and last are maybe the important ones. The first one is you should only look to God. There is only one God and you should only worship Him and then the last one is you shouldn't covet anything that belongs to your neighbour that you shouldn’t look at the people around you too much... So, we need to find some way to look up and not to look around because when we look around it's not that we figure out what to do it just ends up being the hyper copycat mimetic crazed environment. You need to find some transcendence.
I personally feel this everyday at work. At any job, at least in theory, your primary aim, and the reason you are working for the organisation, is the prosperity of the enterprise. You want to maximise your creation of widgets whether that is sales of SaaS products or achieving health results in a community. Producing profits and shareholder value, increasing life expectancy, creating a cohort of kids with globally competitive maths scores, or serving the best philly cheesesteak - there is always something in the world you ostensibly want to get.
In every group, however, there is a gravitational black hole of social pressures. Raises, promotions, visibility on marketing materials, awards, standings in the office politics. These mimetic aims suck up all the energy and dilute the possibility of genuine care for the outcomes. Not to speak of the broader desires for the goods that come beyond the enterprise’s mandate.
I think everyone has experienced, at least once, the feeling that if only everyone they worked with cared paramountly about actually achieving the outcome they said they wanted they would get there in a heartbeat.
As we go about our lives we want to craft a unique journey that expresses our character authentically and concretely, without undue cause to question our moral standing. Instead we tend to end up with a trajectory that is the mirror of our social groups. A set of stories that are narrow, hollow, and even ethically dubious.
When tragedy strikes though our world collapses and with it all of our social norms. If we lose a job, experience a severe illness, or end a relationship we also necessarily break with our social setting. At that moment we cannot want what our peers want because they are no longer our peers. We need to look around for a new model to follow.
The easy choice in this setting is to return to a place of comfort and get back ‘in’ with the same crowd or perhaps find another social group to latch onto as quickly as possible. Agency is the courage to instead use the space that tragedy has created to look up, to honestly question the world and yourself to try and uncover a path that is more authentic.
If we want to pursue our own path in life and become high-agency people, the rule is to always keep our eyes high and forward. We have to find something worth paying attention to that is more than the shared desires of our contemporaries. This is a constant struggle and we may not always be able to manage it but, as long as we’re paying attention, we can at least make sure we never waste the gift of tragedy.
Thanks to Sherry Ning for reading a draft of this essay and providing suggestions on how it could be improved.
I first heard this story on Twitter earlier this week and was stunned that I had never heard it before.
The heuristic isn’t comprehensive. Not every high-agency person will have obviously experienced tragedy as part of their story. Yet, every high-agency that does experience tragedy will be transformed by it.
It is not always the case that it is tragedy induces the wandering of a high agency person but it does seem that wandering is a requirement. Moses and the Israelites wandered in the desert after the tragedy of being sent out from Egypt. Abraham also wandered but it was in heeding God’s call to venture out from a comfortable life not the depths of tragedy that led him there.
Ben, I’ve read this 4 times now and keep revisiting it. Please continue writing. Incredible read.
What an amazing read